Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1987. In Words about Words about Words, Murray Krieger advances his ongoing dialogue with the rich diversity of contemporary literary theory and elaborates on his own position as it grows out of an opposing relation to much of current criticism. Krieger examines the kinds of ideologies and ontologies smuggled into literary theory that purports to be anti-ideological and anti-ontological. He explores the extent to which critical fashions dictate the development of theory and the reasons why particular theories exclude certain kinds of literary works in favor of others. Under such circumstances, Krieger asks, What becomes of the critic's task of evaluation? Further, what is the relation of the idea of progress to criticism and the arts, and what is the effect of these notions on cultural and intellectual institutions? He seeks an alternative to the deterministic tendencies of the new historicism in viewing the relations of literature and literary criticism to soci
Table of ContentsPreface
Part I. Theory and Institutions: Critical Movements and Academic Structures
Chapter 1. Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text
Chapter 2. The Arts and the Idea of Progress
Chapter 3. From Theory to Thematics: The Ideological Underside of Recent Theory
Chapter 4. Literary Invention, Critical Fashion, and the Impulse to Theoretical Change: "Or Whether Revolution Be the Same"
Chapter 5. A Meditation on a Critical Theory Institute
Part II. Critical Positions: Self-definition and Other Definitions
Chapter 6. An Apology for Poetics
Chapter 7. A Colloquy on "An Apology for Poetics"
Chapter 8. The Literary Privilege of Evaluation
Chapter 9. An E.H. Gombrich Retrospective: The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion
Chapter 10. "Both Sides Now"
Part III. Reconsideration of Special Texts jar Special Reasons
Chapter 11. Presentation and Repres entation in the Renaissance Lyric: The Net of Words and the Escape of the Gods
Chapter 12. A Humanity in the Humanities: Literature among the Discourses
Chapter 13. The Conversion from History to Utopia in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Chapter 14. Orpheus mit Gluck: The Deceiving Gratific(a)tions of Presence
Chapter 15. "A Waking Dream": The Symbolic
Alternative to Allegory
Index
